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The vase cracks open on the floor. He falls beside it, hands to his face, still screaming. Inside, the universe keeps exploding. Flames crawl up the wall behind the headboard. The bedsheets are blackened, like the horses, the trees, the cabins, the bodies.
The voice again: “Time to leave, Theta. You don’t want to stay here.”
You look over. He’s standing in the doorway. Henry is talking to you here inside your dream. “Theta, darlin’. You don’t have to stay here.”
“Yes. I do. It’s my fault.”
“No. It’s not. You can leave, Theta. Why don’t you get out?”
“I can’t. Fire. Fire will get me.”
“There’s a door.” He nods
to something you can’t see, just over your shoulder. You look, and there it is, shining through the flames, a door. “Go on, darlin’. No reason to stick around here.”
You walk through the door. And then you are running.
Running from the burning house and the beating man.
Running from the broken vase and the broken screams.
Running onto the bright stage, where applause greets you like wildflowers scattered on the wind. But you can never outrun the coiled fever hiding inside you, and the fear that it will return and burn through everything you love.
Theta woke from her dream drenched in sweat and gasping for breath. She threw off her damp sleep mask and looked around wildly, relieved to see that she was in her bedroom in the Bennington and not that other place. Her pajamas were soaked through, but she was burning up inside, so she stumbled to the bathroom and splashed her face and hands with water until her skin cooled. It wasn’t until she returned to her bedroom that she noticed the faint, scorched outlines of her hands imprinted on the sheets: black and white.
Sleep would be impossible now, so Theta made a cup of coffee, lit a cigarette, and sat by the window overlooking the rain-ravaged street. Henry was with David downtown. How she wished he were home so that she could crawl into bed with him, rest her head on his chest, and hear him say, “It’s just a dream, darlin’.” It was like a monster lived inside her, and with each night, it was getting closer to breaking through her skin. Theta couldn’t shut down the worry buzzing around her brain:
What if the monster came out when she was onstage or talking to reporters?
What if it came out during her screen test at Vitagraph in a few hours?
What if her friends knew about the destructive power coiled inside her? Would they feel safe around her anymore?
Would Memphis? What if she hurt Memphis?
Theta pressed her cheek to the window. It was cold from the rain and felt good. It was those threatening notes that had made things so much worse. There was nothing familiar about the handwriting. After the first one, Theta had paid a visit to the florist’s shop, but no one remembered who had bought the flowers. “It was a telephone order,” the florist recalled. “That’s all I know.”
Whoever it was remembered Theta from her days on the Orpheum Circuit, when she played the vaudeville theaters all across the country as Little Betty Sue Bowers, “The Ringleted Rascal.” Betty Sue Bowers wore a pinafore dress, tap shoes, and sweet, girlish curls. Betty Sue Bowers had a stage mother from hell and, later, a handsome husband named Roy who took out his anger at the world on his young wife with his fists. And one night, Betty Sue Bowers had killed him with a power she didn’t know she had: a dangerous ability to start fires with her emotions. As far as anyone else knew, Betty Sue Bowers had also died in the inferno that night. They didn’t know that Theta had hopped a freight car out of Kansas, bound for the bright lights of Broadway. In New York City, Theta had met Henry, cut her hair, traded in Kansas homespun charm for sleek glamour, and become a reinvention: Theta Knight, Ziegfeld Follies girl.
Someone did, though. And now they were in her city, leaving her cryptic notes. Was it Mrs. Bowers? It would be just like her adoptive mother to try for a payday through blackmail. Could it be one of Roy’s former pals at the soda shop? What about the neighbors—would any of them have seen Theta running for her life toward the railroad tracks? (Not that any of the neighbors had ever bothered to come upstairs during the shouting and screaming; not one had ever asked about the bruises and black eyes.) Could one of the hoboes she’d shared the freight car with have told others? All it would take was one of them to see her face in the newspaper, so different but still a ghost of the old Betty left there—Say, doesn’t that look a little like…? It wouldn’t matter that Theta hadn’t meant to kill Roy and that she had very little memory of that night. The world would see a cold-blooded murderess. They’d call Roy a good fella who got involved with the wrong girl. She’d seen such things play out before. She knew the world was stacked against girls like her.
Theta finished her cigarette. She took a bath. Combed out her sleek bob and short bangs. She drew on her pencil-thin eyebrows and painted a Cupid’s bow mouth in crimson. As the dawn inched up along the Manhattan skyline, Theta chose her outfit—a deep blue silk dress, a long strand of knotted pearls, and a gray velvet cocoon coat with a fat fur-trimmed collar that she’d “borrowed” from the Follies costume shop for the day. She stuck out her hand for an imaginary shake. “How do you do?” she said in her smoky purr of a voice. “I am Miss Theta Knight.”
Yes. She was Theta Knight. Not Betty Sue Bowers. Nobody could threaten her back into being that girl. That girl was dead and buried. Theta Knight had a screen test today at Vitagraph. Theta Knight would get that contract and run all the way to Hollywood with Memphis if she had to. She took the elevator down to the lobby.
“Sure look nice today, Miss Knight,” the elevator operator commented.
“Thanks, Tom.”
“You going somewhere special?”
“Vitagraph,” Theta said, enjoying the feel of the word on her tongue.
“Oh, well, good luck. You might say a wish to Mr. Bennington on your way out, then.”
“Come again?”
“That picture of Mr. Bennington that hangs there in the hallway? I heard he looks after the Bennington guests if you ask him to.” Tom shrugged. “Can’t hurt. Here’s the lobby now.”
